There are several steps to manage complex custom software projects for successful deployment. In the fast-paced development industry, proper project management is critical to avoid overdue, over-budget deliverables. Simultaneously, the right practices can ensure that teams stay on-track to meet client goals and deliver value to their stakeholders. As a software project manager yourself, you need to know the most important steps to manage complicated projects in your pipeline. This way, you can improve your team leadership and quality assurance through your digital transformations. Plus, you can set realistic goals to take on more clients. Read on to learn about how to manage complex custom software projects for successful deployment.

Define The Project Scope

First, define the project scope to manage your complex custom software development. Develop a project scope statement to define key objectives of the software. Ideally, these goals should follow SMART practices. Indeed, they should be specific, measurable, and achievable. Of course, they should also be relevant to the client’s needs and time-bound to a deadline. Once you know your objectives, outline the statement of work. Typically, this includes a breakdown of deliverables and milestones your company must hit for the product to hit the market. Importantly, you should also list scope exclusions to avoid additional deliverables being added to the workflow without proper budget considerations. Definitely, define the project scope to manage your complex custom software.

Install Advanced Development Tools

Next, you should also install advanced development tools to manage your complex custom software projects. For example, many successful development enterprises use a kubernetes registry by JFrog to provision their k8s cluster with charts and images. Once installed, use this tool to gain insight and control over code-to-cluster process. In addition, you can collect and manage artifacts for your containerized application. Plus, you can trace the content, dependencies and relationships with other Docker images. Notably, you can also use your kubernetes registry as a universal repository manager for your CI/CD pipeline. In short, install advanced development tools to manage your complex software projects.

Implement An Iterative Methodology

In addition, you should also implement an iterative methodology to manage complex your team’s complex software projects. For example, you can switch to the agile approach to break up your project into distinct phases. Then, match each of these phases to a tangible deliverable. Typically, development teams plan for about 2 to 4 week-long iterations depending on the project needs. Once you have a timeline set, you should also plan a rough estimate for how many phases the project will consist of. Then, set up regular meetings with your client to get feedback and showcase the software functionality. Absolutely, implement an iterative methodology to manage complex custom software projects.

Utilize Project Management Software

Moreover, you can also utilize project management software to streamline your team’s workflow. With these systems, you can upload important files, documents, and updates to reach all your team members at once. In addition, many project management tools use Gantt charts to track your task’s duration. Typically, these charts display stacked bars with task elements, dependency relationships, and progress percentages. Additionally, many project management platforms offer an integrated communication system. Then, you can chat, call, and hold video conferences on green software engineering, blockchain, and other types of projects. If you’re managing a remote software team, this is great to keep everyone on the same page. Undoubtedly, utilize project management software to improve your team’s development workflow.

Delegate Tasks Based On Skills

Furthermore, delegate tasks based on your team member’s skills to stay on top of your complex software projects. Assign administrative tasks to yourself or a business analyst. Ideally, these executive professionals should stay on call in case a bottleneck pops up. On the other hand, you can delegate technical pieces of the software to your internal teams. For example, developers can handle the project’s coding. UI/UX designers can oversee application design, user experience, and intuitiveness. Of course, your quality assurance team should handle testing and final functionality checks on the software. Hire a cybersecurity expert to handle vulnerability testing. Certainly, delegate tasks on your team to avoid bottlenecks in your software development project.

There are several important steps to manage complex custom software projects for successful deployment. First, you should define the project scope to define your timeline and milestone. Next, install advanced development tools to manage your software code. In addition, implement an iterative methodology like the agile approach. Moreover, utilize project management software to track task progress and streamline communication. Furthermore, delegate tasks based on skills to avoid pipeline bottlenecks. Follow these steps to learn about how to manage complex custom software projects for successful deployment.

If you want to keep your customers engaged, automate repetitive tasks and make your product development as productive as possible, you must then optimize the product experience management process.

Product experience isn’t a new concept for the company and brings together different elements of the business to improve your product and your customer’s experience with it. It combines various departments to work jointly to achieve it.

A flawless product experience management process will not only help you deliver better products but will also help you overcome challenges, boost efficiency and save yourself valuable time. Ultimately, ensuring a good product experience management process will help you increase sales, build loyalty, and boost net promoter scores.

If you’re interested in learning how to heighten your product experience management process, continue reading below for some useful tips.

Listen to Your Customers 

One of your top priorities when improving your product experience management process should be to listen to your customers and allow them to provide feedback. Focus on learning what they want and create a product around this. By knowing what’s inside their heads, you’ll create something that your customers will be willing to buy instantly.

Create a platform where you can ask for feedback directly from your customers. Email surveys, phone call surveys, and feedback emails are excellent ways to get them to respond and then use that feedback to improve your products. 

Getting feedback can sometimes be difficult, so consider incentivizing it. Offer your customers special discounts or free delivery in return. This way they’ll know that you’re sincerely open and willing to listen to what they want and need, and through the received feedback, you’ll be able to understand them better and improve your product.

Successfully Onboard New Clients

The onboarding process is something that creates the first impression of your company and how you manage it determines whether the customer will continue using your product. This is the reason why you must use solutions that will manage repetitive tasks so you don’t neglect any details and get the most out of onboarding new clients. Not only will it save you precious time, but you will also be able to engage the new users at every step of the onboarding process.

If, for example, you are a SaaS business and you have a customer that has signed up for your software but has not received an email to follow the steps they should take, they might get frustrated and decide to quit the platform. So, with automated solutions, you can set up notifications to remind your team members to follow up with the customers, and then you can retarget them with helpful tutorials so they can learn how to use the software.

Another way to improve the product experience is to provide acknowledgments every time a client completes a milestone. So, for example, when they complete their first task on the platform, you can use automation to activate messages that will congratulate them on their progress and encourage them to continue to explore your platform.

Use Live Chat

Efficient customer service is key to leveling up the product experience management process. If you take too long to respond to a customer’s request, they might turn to your competitors. For this reason, you should consider implementing live chat on your home page as a fast way to solve customer requests and help your clients on their journey.  

Live chats are much more efficient than channels like email or phone and by using them, you’ll be able to handle multiple requests simultaneously and boost productivity. With live chat, you can reduce repetition for customers. You will instantly get access to data on their request so you don’t have to ask them to repeat themselves.

Live chats offer 24/7 support so customers won’t have to worry about not receiving a reply and you will be able to take care of them at any point of the day.

Make Sure Clients Are Always Satisfied

Chances are great that at some point a client will no longer see the value in your product and decide to stop doing business with you. But if you take steps to ensure they are satisfy at all times, you’ll be able to retain them more successfully. This will ultimately help minimize churn, re-engage more users, and stop losing a myriad of opportunities as well as revenue from lost customers.

Final Thoughts

The only way a product can make it is if it meets users’ needs and expectations and if you keep an open communication line with customers. You can achieve this goal with a great product experience management process, which you can enhance by following the above-mentioned tips.

Also Read: What is Cloud Computing?

Introduction:

Web Application Security – As the need of mobile application testing is rising day by day, enterprises have focused their attention on security testing. The reason behind it is the requirement for increased app security has become unavoidable due to the frequent release of new app functionalities. For DevOps and security teams, this constant innovation creates a complex environment. Developers with limited awareness of security and privacy threats do not leverage the power of combined functional testing and mobile app security testing to find bugs and improve app quality. Some apps entice consumers with glitzy features and all-in-one packages. These users are motivated to purchase apps from untrustworthy sources, which leads to mobile and web application security threats. That mobile and online application compromise critical data, and the implications eventually become a nightmare. To achieve a secure and threat-free application, a comprehensive approach to mobile and web application security that examines all layers, including network, host, and app, is mandatory. Hackers use advanced tools and tactics to exploit the weak areas in apps, and constant testing turns out to be the only way to ensure that their security is not compromised.

Continuous Testing and Application Security

To combat security risks, the engineers use secure coding techniques and design hack-resilient solutions for securing networks, hosts, and application configuration of servers. Threats break app security by using malicious input to access the app and compromising user data saved in the apps, even after safe firewalls are installed to screen out hackers, viruses, and worms that destroy the app.

So, the organizations must adopt continuous testing to keep a check on the sanity of their apps. Continuous security testing allows one to detect and track security threats that exploit an application’s vulnerability at an early stage, preventing potential harm to the apps and fixing concerns quickly.

Web Application Security

However great websites you produce through cross-browser testing or various other test automation techniques , everything may go into wein without security testing. Hackers can compromise web security in a variety of ways, including defacing websites, obtaining credit card information, infecting websites with viruses, and so on. All these security breaches necessitate constant monitoring to keep track of and counter threats. Financial online apps are constantly at risk of online fraud from cyber-criminals who will keep trying until they find a way to obtain access to the app and steal website credentials to commit fraud again. Even if a website application is protected by both new generation firewalls and traditional network security controls (which sometimes fail to detect malicious input), it still requires continuous security testing to identify security threats and modern world multi-vector attacks. It protects businesses from costly and catastrophic data breaches as well as downtime.

Mobile Application Security

In an era where customers have grown accustomed to the conveniences of smartphones and mobile applications, businesses fight to develop more and more user-friendly apps to expand their user base. They try to accomplish this by utilizing various mobile technologies and platforms to accelerate their business operations, hence increasing productivity and ROI. This overwhelming response from businesses and consumers to the convenience of utilizing mobile apps also comes with security concerns. Users of mobile apps download and utilize consumer apps, games, and other content from less reputable sources on the same device where corporate apps are installed, posing security risks. Increased security threats might lead to major data breach issues from the business side as a result of such unanticipated occurrences. This necessitates considerable attention and constant testing to properly monitor and remove attacks and protect the organization, employees, and customer data.

Conclusion

To combat web app security challenges, businesses now use a combination of cloud, mobility, and social computing. A rigorous app security testing approach carried out by a specialist software team is required to achieve this.

Data is at the heart of real estate, in its appraisals, price indices, forecasts and sales histories. But, until only recently, the industry hasn’t done a lot with this data. Appraisers used in-person inspections prone to human error and misjudgment. Investors and developers used an imperfect mix of gut feeling and retrospective data to make significant decisions. And consumers, starved for hard data, chose their real estate agents based on unreliable third-party recommendations.

As Nobul CEO Regan McGee put it to Digital Connect, “The real estate industry is awash in data, yet we as a sector have not really embraced the tools available to leverage that flood of information.” McGee is one of the innovators working to change that (more on his company below) as real estate on the whole moves to embrace new analytical methods and data sets.

This article explores a few ways that data is transforming the real estate industry.

Capitalizing on Big Data in Property Analysis

Big data refers to large stores of data sets too complex for everyday software to mine and analyze. However, real estate investors and developers can mine these mountains of data using machine learning and AI. And the rich insights contained therein are vastly improving real estate decision-making processes.

Big data in real estate contains a heady mixture of traditional and non-traditional data: everything from the standard vacancy rates and rents per square foot in a neighborhood, to unconventional metrics like public bathrooms per square mile and average user ratings of bars in the neighborhood. In combination, these variables paint a strikingly accurate picture of where potential lies in real estate – in other words, where to invest and develop.

“Match Score” Algorithms to Empower Consumers

Historically, real estate consumers have been shut out of a lot of data – valuable information that could have made their experience easier and cheaper. Nobul, mentioned above, is one of the companies acting to amend that industry opacity. And it’s using data to get the job done.

Nobul uses a proprietary algorithm to sift through mountains of data related to real estate agents: location, sales histories, verified reviews, etc. Consumers can access these insights to find relevant, quality real estate agents that share their values and match their budget.

It’s one example of how data can be used to create a more equitable, transparent experience for real estate consumers.

AVMs for Lightning Quick Property Valuations

Automated Valuation Models (AVMs) are real estate appraisal tactics that leverage statistical modelling to provide fast, accurate property valuations. The best ones pull from diverse data sets and have been shown to outpace human appraisers in both accuracy and efficiency.

Moreover, AVMs are a hedge against fraud, malfeasance and general bias in the appraisal sector. Because statistical models can’t be influenced by money or subjectivity biases, some experts believe they constitute a fairer appraiser than their human counterparts.

Data has always been a part of real estate. But with innovations like big data analytics, match score algorithms and AVMs, innovation is finally catching up with real estate data.